The present invention relates to a triaxially stabilized armored turret for light weapons, particularly for automatic type weapons.
In such turrets, which are generally known in the art, it is necessary for the weapons and the ammunition and the gun crew for the weapons to be accommodated within the turret. Additionally, no interfering external moments should have any influence on the stabilization of the turret.
It is known to provide a triaxially stabilized turret for an armored vehicle in which the outer shell of the turret in the region of the vehicle roof, i.e. the side wall of the turret, is designed to be spherical with respect to its cardanic suspension. In order to avoid deflecting moments resulting from the transmission of the recoil of the weapon barrel to the turret, which deflecting moments additionally stress the stabilization alignment drives particularly during continuous fire, the weapon is disposed in the turret so that its bore axis passes through the point of cardanic suspension. This type of weapons arrangement will be referred to as a "concentric weapons arrangement" hereafter.
When designing such turrets for lightweight, and thus small sized, weapons and for one or two gunners, it is desirable to build the turret with as small a spherical diameter as possible, in order to keep its silhouette small.
This type of turret design with a concentric weapons arrangement, however, has the drawback that due to the pivoting movement of the turret in all directions with respect to the vehicle, the lower spherical portion of the turret shell extends very close to the vertical axis of the turret. This results in only a small lower opening being available in the turret shell for passage of the suspension or support members of the turret, which, for reasons of the ballistic protection thereof are advisably accommodated inside the turret shell.
A further drawback of this type of turret design is that the crew members cannot put their feet into the vehicle interior disposed therebelow alongside the suspension members for the turret because the lower opening in the turret shell is too narrow and thus they can only sit in the turret in a very uncomfortable position with their knees raised high. This drawback can be eliminated by mounting the seats for the crew members at an appropriately high position in the turret but this would increase the height of the turret and cause its silhouette to become undesirably large.
In order to overcome the drawbacks of the above-mentioned turret design with a concentric weapons arrangement, one might consider disposing the cardanic suspension point below the bore axis of the weapon approximately at the height of the vehicle roof. The opening in the turret shell at the lowest point of the turret thus becomes large, the crew members have more room and can place their feet outside of the spherical turret portion and into the interior of the vehicle below.
The drawbacks of this type of design, however, are the high recoil of the weapon about the cardanic suspension point, which results from the distance of the cardanic suspension point from the bore axis of the barrel of the weapon, and the fact that in this design the turret roof is inevitably rather small which makes it impossible to mount any of the required sighting means.